Upgrading from a 7 year old system..

BennyBoo

BennyBoo

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So, The time has come to get this ancient PC back upto speed..

I bought this PC about 7 years ago, It's a Abit AN52V, Athlon 64 x2 5200+ @ 2.6Hz and 2GB (i know!) RAM

This was top of the range when I bought it.. It's now getting on. It's still ok, I still edit all my Photography on here, watch films and listen to my music as it's hooked up to the TV/AV system downstairs and it's never really let me down, until now.

Sometimes, it randomly turns off, it now overheats as the Graphics Cards fans have given up so I've retro fitted a pair, but they're not upto the job..

What I will still use are, Case, 750W PSU, about 5TB of HDD's, the Radeon HD6950 (donated last year when my Sapphire HD3970 one packed in) and my Auzuntech X-Mystique sound card..

What I really need is a Motherboard, CPU and RAM bundle.. I'd like at least 16GB Ram, but I'd also like to budget in a watercooling kit (as the PC is in the front room) and also either need to get a new cooler for the graphics card or run it in the watercooling loop.. If a watercooling kit is going to push the budget far too much, i'd still have to budget in a new cooler for the graphics card anyway..

What do you think my chances are of getting all that with £300ish..?

I'm not going to lie, I used to be a right PC geek, but of late, i've fallen out of touch as to bargains and what I could overclock for the best price over expensive items..

I don't really mind switching to Intel, but would like to stay AMD..

Thanks :)
 
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Thanks for all the above :)

people keep mentioning the i5 to me.. Not sure if i'm going to be able to stretch to one and have a decent amount for the rest of the system..

What about this bundle from Scan..

Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-D3H - £64.21
AMD A10 7700K Black Edition, S FM2+, Kaveri Core, 3.8GHz, AMD Radeon R7, 95W - £96.92
Thermalright HR-02 Macho CPU Cooler - £37.18
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance Pro, 2133MHz, CAS 11-11-11-30, 1.5V [Blue Heatsink] - £86.16

Plus £11.99 delivery = £332.46..

I'll be getting an SSD in Janurary to go with this bundle, so that should speed up the OS and Lightroom..
 
Oops.. I mistook the motherboard in the picture lower down to be the one in the bundle..!

That is quite tempting now then..

But that's £20 into the SSD budget, stock cooler and cheaper Ram..

I'll have a look at the i5 vs AMD R7's debates. Is Intel the best for Photography..?
 
unless youre overclocking the stock cooler should be fine.

the i5-4690K blows the AMD A10 7700K out of the water on benchmarks. AMD these days are struggling clock for clock compared to Intel (my opinion). the onboard intel GPU should be fine for photography (lightroom isnt GPU accelerated anyway).
 
Thanks,

Looking around I can get the Corsair Vengeance Pro 8gb ram, Intel i5 4690k and an Asus pro z97 board for £315 from separate places, so could be a decent build of I see a few new years sales..

Thanks for the info :)
 
Are you looking to over clock the PC?
Or is the water cooling solely to keep the noise down?
 
I'm not specifically looking to overclock, it's just back in the day it was cheaper to buy a lower down spec CPU and overclock it to higher spec performance.. Not sure if that's still the case..?

It was purely for sound.. I was thinking a low end kit would produce quiet sound, while still performing at stock, if not better level.. I think i'm going to stick with air cooling for now..
 
I was going to say, if noise is your main concern, then I imagine it's probably cheaper to look at low noise after market CPU cooler and fans. And then a quiet PSU.
 
check your power supply has the right connectors. (eg motherboard, sata etc) I recently did the same thing (assuming I would reuse my PSU, case, DVD drive etc) but ended up replacing pretty much everything......

Although I use AMD I tend to agree that intel have the edge at present, as said above, AMD need either higher clock speeds or more cores to get the same performance, neither give best results in the real world.
EDIT: meant to add that the downside is you do appear to pay a bit more for intel......
 
brman said:
check your power supply has the right connectors. (eg motherboard, sata etc) I recently did the same thing (assuming I would reuse my PSU, case, DVD drive etc) but ended up replacing pretty much everything......

Although I use AMD I tend to agree that intel have the edge at present, as said above, AMD need either higher clock speeds or more cores to get the same performance, neither give best results in the real world.
EDIT: meant to add that the downside is you do appear to pay a bit more for intel......
Click to expand...

Aye thanks for that, I've got a modular PSU, so I do have all the modern connections :) the only thing I'll lose out on is an IDE 40gb hard drive.. Its only got music on, so i'll transfer it over to another drive.


donetello said:
Here https://secure.scan.co.uk/web/basket
Or could try CCL online
Click to expand...

Thanks for going through and choosing a package.. You'll have to list it here though as the link doesn't work haha

It doesn't save a basket as a link, I tried before to link, I just get taken to the home page..

But i'm intrigued to see what you chose :)
 
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  • Motherboard
    Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 [£87.99] Asus SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0, AMD 990FX - Thermal Armor [£109.69] Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z, AMD 990FX Chipset [£141.97]
  • CPU
    AMD FX 8320 Black Edition, 8-Core, 3.5GHz, 16MB Cache [£92.65] AMD FX 8350 Black Edition, 8-Core, 4GHz, 16MB Cache [£109.83
  • Memory - DDR3
    4GB Total (1x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 - 1600MHz [£30.40] 2 * 8GB Total (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 - 1600MHz [£60.80] 2 * 16GB Total (2x8GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 - 1600MHz [£121.60]
  • Graphics Cards - A Graphics card is required to use this bundle!
    I have my own Graphics card I plan to use or will select one from below/scan site
  • Swapped ram to 8gb and price came to £340
 
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